I was waiting for this. Granted, it came much sooner then I planned, but it came. Iggy has once again given his ultimatum to the Conservatives, saying that they will vote against their budget if it contains another corporate tax cut. You’d think that Iggy would have learned from the fall of 2009, when he did the same thing (remember, “Harper, your time is up”). Clearly, his time wasn’t up, as Iggy fell in the polls and had to admit it was the wrong move and that Canadians didn’t want an election. Canadians still don’t, if the recent Nanos’s poll is any indication.
So why has Iggy gone and stuffed his foot in his mouth again? My only guess is that Iggy, wrongly, has figured he can take on the NDP and usurp their supporters. Not likly. In the last by-election The NDP lost out by a relatively small margin (1100 votes, roughly 5%). Also, the by-election (at 30%) had far less people vote then in a federal election (generally around 47- 50%, where the entire province had a turn out roughly the federal average at 56%). Jumping on Harper because of marginal confidence based on a by-election seems to me unrealistic.
So what then? Does he think that Canadians have changed much in a year. They are still more worried about their jobs, their pensions and their savings then they are worried about who will represent them in parliament. So the NDP, jumping all over this new ultimatum, have done what they did last time; they have put themselves back into the game by providing Harper with budgetary cover in exchange for some progressive initiatives i.e. seniors pension support, the Eco-Retrofit program among others.
We will wait for the polls to show us how this has faired with our fickle public, but my prediction in that we will see Iggy’s vote share go down, again, because he has underestimated that Harper has won out the PR battle against him. The NDP don’t have much ground to gain against Harper, as they likely don’t want an election either. We will see how things go, but I don’t see this working out well for Iggy, regardless of how he goes about saying he is more progressive then the NDP.
